Alt Text on Staff Page User Icons

[chemicallace]

I'm working on Bug 2050 and wanted to get the opinions of screen-reader users and others who look at the alt text on images for user icons.

Currently, the alt text for icons is generally the description the user provides for the icon and on regular site pages this is automatically added when the page is generated. On the Dreamwidth staff page, there is no alt text for any of the icons at this time. I try to include alt text in my images on most web pages for both standards compliance and accessibility reasons. However, it's not clear in this situation whether or not having an alt text on these icons with the user name of the icon owner, key words, or a description would be useful or a nuisance. The user name is given in text in close proximity to the image, and any keywords or descriptions would be undesirable on our end because they would need to be hard-coded into the page and wouldn't automatically update when the user updated their icon keywords or description.

Would alt text on these user icons be helpful? Or is it unnecessary and/or an annoyance?

Comments

[vass]

Shouldn't it be the icon description, rather than the keywords? I filled in the description field specifically because I thought that was the alt text.

[kyrielle]

I don't know about that, but I went to look, and the hover-over tooltip for the staff journal threw me for a loop. Hover-overs are supposed to take me to the person being talked about/referenced.... I get that it's because that icon space is being used, but...meh.